Nobody Home

Renata Salecl

Capitalism brought dramatic changes to the character of funeral rituals in Slovenia. In the past, bereaved family members usually visited a state-run funeral home where they selected from among several basic funeral services and a couple of different coffins or, in the case of cremation, caskets for the ashes. Today, the ritual more often resembles a shopping experience and one that provokes feelings of shame. When the bereaved visit a funeral home, they now must make decisions about numerous details as to how the funeral ritual will be conducted.

Most of these decisions concern objects that will either never be visible or will be immediately ruined. If, for example, the deceased will be cremated, the family needs to decide how elaborate and expensive the coffin used for cremation will be. Then they need to decide how much to spend on the casket in which the ashes will be stored. This casket will later be buried underground. In addition to determining how extravagant the casket will be, other things to consider include flower arrangements at the funeral, musicians for the service, and even the size of the announcement to be placed in the daily newspaper.

Why it is that such a shopping experience provokes shame? When making choices in front of the salesperson in the funeral home, one has the feeling of being exposed to two types of gazes. There is the gaze of the individual who is selling you the services, but one also feels the gaze of a non-substantial other who appears as an abstract agency looking at our choice from above. This abstract other is not the deceased but rather what Jacques Lacan called the Other—the social symbolic structure that governs our lives. The Other comprises society at large, from social institutions to cultural rituals and, especially, the language in which we live.

Lacan’s assertion is that the Other does not exist, but it still functions. In other words, the social symbolic order in which we live is not coherent; marked by antagonisms, it is essentially inconsistent. People nevertheless create their own fiction of a coherent Other, this desire not to see its inconsistency being crucial for their self-perception. Since the subject is also marked with a constitutive lack—i.e. is also inconsistent—he or she tries to find some perception of him or herself as consistent by turning to a fantasy of a consistent Other.

Not a casket to be ashamed of. Courtesy Jon Austin, Museum of Funeral Customs.

The term shame is often used in conjunction with identity.
Someone, for example, might feel ashamed for being poor, a member of a
particular nation, and so on. One might also feel ashamed when not
acting in accordance with a symbolic mandate with which the subject has
identified. For example, a soldier might feel ashamed that he is not
acting like a brave member of the army when he is anxiously trying to
avoid active involvement in a battle, a father might feel ashamed for
not acting like a paternal figure, a judge for not acting like an
authority, etc.

The shame one experiences when arranging a funeral ritual triggers
similar feelings of failure, of not acting properly. No matter what you
do when presented with the choices in the funeral home, you fail. If you
refuse to buy the extravagant casket, you will feel stingy, but if you
choose the most expensive options, you will feel like you are showing
off. Failure is inevitable.

Such feeling of failure can be explained by looking at how Freud
linked the experience of shame with other feelings of self-reproach:
“The affect of the self-reproach may be transformed by various psychical
processes into other affects, which then enter consciousness more
clearly than the affect itself: for instance, into anxiety (fear of the
consequences of the action to which the self-reproach applies),
hypochondria (fear of its bodily effects), delusions of persecutions
(fear of its social effects), shame (fear of other people knowing about
it), and so on.”1

When we are ashamed, what is it that we are afraid that other
people will know about? It is not simply that we feel like a failure
since we did not in fact perform in accordance with some social
expectation or did not fulfill some symbolic role. Shame also confronts
us with the acknowledgment that we are never, by definition, able
to fulfill these expectations or roles. What we do not want others to
know about is that we are in essence always a fraud. We might
temporarily take on some symbolic role and bask in the fantasy of its
consistence, but sooner or latter we will be exposed in our nakedness,
and our identity, marked by a constitutive lack, will be shown to be a
sham.

Diagrams from Wilbur M. Krieger’s 1951 Successful Funeral
Service Management, illustrating how to arrange a showroom in order to
maximize sales. Based on the author’s “Keystone Approach” to effective,
low-pressure merchandising, the arrangement of caskets is aimed to secure
consistent sales in the upper, but not necessarily highest, price range.
Krieger recommends that upon entering the selection room, the bereaved
first encounter a casket in the third (i.e.; second most expensive) quartile of
the funeral director’s inventory—a unit approximately $150 more than the
median in 1951. Should the buyer balk at the price, he is shown a cheaper unit
that provides “strong contrast both in price and quality” and is positioned
such that he must turn his back on the first casket. Recoiling from the unappealing
second option, the buyer then turns to the third casket in the Keystone
arrangement, a “rebound unit” priced at $50 over the median, and thus
eases back into the third quartile, seemingly on his own terms. For the buyer
who after being shown the first option wants to see something even better,
Krieger advises turning right into a wide aisle that provides easy access to
upper third and fourth quartile units. This technique is based on a conversation
the author had with a “red-coated Royal Mounty” who told him that
people lost in wide-open spaces “always turn in a great circle to their right.”
The customer whose budget prevents ambling through the selection room in
this “natural” manner is taken, on the other hand, down a narrow “resistance
lane” on the left to a corner where a few first and second quartile units are
kept out of the way.

The iconography of shamed individuals often shows them with their
heads hanging and eyes downcast. On the one hand, they are avoiding the
gaze emanating from others, but they are also trying not to look at the
others. For example, in many cultures, one looks down when approaching a
figure of authority. What is it that ought not to be seen when
confronted with authority? Here we can say that shame also concerns the
fact that we are not supposed to see others in their nakedness. To show
respect to someone is to avert the gaze, to not look at what lies behind
his or her symbolic insignia, and not see the lack that lies behind all
authority.

Shame is, therefore, related to the inconsistency of the subject;
to the inconsistency of the specific authorities that we deal with in
our lives; and to the inconsistency of the Other. Here again we have the
problem of visibility. When I feel ashamed, it is not simply that I am
try to avoid the disapproving gaze of the Other in front of whom I feel
humiliated. By averting my own gaze, I am also trying not to see the
fact that the Other is itself also inconsistent, or, better, that the
Other, in the final analysis, does not exist. As Joan Copjec points out:
“Shame is awakened not when one looks at oneself, or those whom one
cherishes, through another’s eyes, but when one suddenly perceives a
lack in the Other. At this moment the subject no longer experiences
herself as a fulfillment of the Other’s desire, as the center of the
world, which now shifts away from her slightly, causing a distance to
open within the subject herself. This distance is not that “superegoic”
one which produces a feeling of guilt and burdens one with an
uncancelable debt to the Other, but is, on the contrary, that which
wipes out the debt. In shame, unlike guilt, one experiences one’s
visibility, but there is no external Other who sees, since shame is
proof that the Other does not exist.”2

When societies try to invent new rituals of shaming, it looks as if
they are desperately trying to hold on to the fiction of a consistent
Other, while in fact they are doing nothing else but exposing its
inconsistency. This is often most visible in how shame is used in
judicial systems. In China, for example, when a criminal is to be
executed, his or her family is asked to pay for the bullet. This demand
in part relies on the shame that the family feels to have a criminal in
its midst. Paying for the bullet thus functions as symbolic compensation
for the criminal’s deeds. However, this act can also be understood to
mean that the judicial system cannot act like a full authority and needs
the family’s “help” in meting out punishment.

Other societies are also trying to introduce more shame into their
penal systems. The British government, for example, has commissioned
research on how best to involve communities in the fight against crime
and raise public confidence in the criminal justice system. The proposal
written by Louise Casey, the former head of Tony Blair’s Respect Task
Force, suggests that offenders sentenced to community punishment be put
to work wearing high-visibility bibs that identify them as criminals.3
Here, we have a particular demand to make the criminals visible, to
expose them to the public, and, of course, to make them experience shame
in regard to their crime. The observing public is supposed to feel
satisfaction in seeing that criminals are punished in a socially useful
way instead of simply biding their time in a prison. But the judicial
system does not simply make shamed criminals visible to the public; it
also uses them to divert the public’s gaze from itself—from its own
utter failure as the authority that is supposed to deter crime.

Sigmund Freud, “Draft K – the neuroses of defence,” in “Extracts from the Fliss Papers,” in Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey (London, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–1974), vol. I, p. 224.

The Times, London, 16 June 2008. Available at www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4144470.ece [link defunct—Eds.].

Renata Salecl is a researcher based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her books include
On Anxiety (Routledge, 2004), (Per)versions of Love and Hate (Verso, 2000),
and The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of
Socialism (Routledge, 1994).